Textile & Promotional

The fabric answers that, not the machine. Sublimation drives disperse dye into the polyester fibre and generally needs at least 65 % polyester and a light-coloured garment. On a cotton t-shirt sublimation is not slow, it simply does not work. DTF is printed onto film and pressed, so it runs on cotton, blends and dark fabric, and it carries a white underbase on every job — the price of which is a hand feel that is never as soft as sublimation. If most of your work is cotton t-shirts, DTF; if most of it is polyester jerseys, flags and tension fabric, sublimation.

The system is built for shops running 200–800 transfers a day across mixed, short-run work. Below 100 transfers a day a 30 cm system fits better; above a few thousand pieces of a single design, screen printing is still cheaper — DTF removes setup time, not unit cost. The 12 m²/h is the four-pass figure on the film side; real line speed is set by the oven and the powder melt, and at heavy coverage it drops to 8–9 m²/h. Every DTF job carries a white underbase, and it is in every calculation.

The calender, not the printer. The MT-1900 A4 prints 120 m²/h of transfer paper at three passes, but the dye only reaches the fabric on the MR-1900 calender, at 180–220 °C with a 30–180 second dwell. Heavy polyester needs a longer dwell and the line falls to half the printer's output. The calender is also the largest electrical load in the shop — 380 V three-phase, around 40 kW. Plan the panel and cable sizing before the machine; shops that leave it until later cannot run the machine for weeks.

All three are part of the consumables plan. DTF white has a 6-month unopened shelf life, half that of the colours — hold no more than twice your monthly usage, and leave circulation running if the machine sits over a weekend. With hot-melt powder it is humidity, not temperature, that decides: move an opened sack into a lidded hopper, keep it on a pallet rather than the floor, and do not store it above 60 %RH. Oven exhaust must be ducted outside; the integrated fume filter reduces odour but does not replace extraction. Do not install this system in a basement with no outside wall.

We publish the fastness results on the technical data sheet: for DTF pigment, ISO 105-C06 ≥ 4 and ISO 105-X12 4–5; for textile pigment, ISO 105-C06 ≥ 4, ISO 105-X12 3–4 and ISO 105-E04 4; for sublimation, EN ISO 105-B02 4–5 and EN ISO 105-C10 ≥ 4. ECO PASSPORT and ZDHC certificates belong to the producing plant, never to a dealer — we do not render those marks as our own, we forward the current certificate against a batch number. If a supplier presents them as theirs, ask to see the original.

Flat, rigid items — awards, phone cases, wooden boxes, glass panels — are laid out on the MF-6090 U3 bed and printed directly; its 180 mm print height takes thick parts without a spacer and the machine runs single-phase. Curved bodies such as flasks, mugs and bottles never sit flat. Those need either a separate machine with a rotary attachment, or a UV DTF crystal label printed on the MC-300 U1 and applied to the item. The second route makes sense even for one piece, because labels can be stocked; the first only pays for itself if you print high volumes of the same body continuously.